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The Art of Money Getting or Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. Barnum (1880)
- SanjayMehta 4y agohttps://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-money-getting https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...
- nabeards 4y agoCame to post the same link (-:
- steve76 4y ago[dead]
- chestertn 4y agoPretty good!
- magic_hamster 4y agoFrom what little I already read, it seems interesting and mostly translateble to modern lessons. Will pin to read later.
- dhsysusbsjsi 4y agoThis is great and remarkably similar to my personal philosophies on spending and work. For example avoiding unproductive debt, spending below means, vocation you enjoy, etc. I do disagree with the bit about accepting rude customers. I will happily forfeit business of a rude customer. This is especially true if your employees are high value and you don’t want them subject to abuse (feel valued), and I hypothesise that in fact genuinely rude customers aren’t as listened to by friends as they think in their own mind.
- mdp2021 4y ago> rude customers Well, in the context of the submitted text, the matter seems different: the section «Be Polite and Kind to Your Customers» expresses a different direction in that very title, and the anecdotal example is about "an usher that «intended to whip a man», «“Because he said I was no gentleman”»" - which (also) heavily suggests that the writer may have omitted some details about "what actually happened". So, about «accepting [which] customers», well do your Cost/Risk/Benefit calculations; about behaviour, good sense be the ground and in case of controversy add more of the same.
- dhsysusbsjsi 4y agoI read this as the customer was rude to the Usher (perhaps due to his station?), and the Usher was rude, but the owner basically told the employee he had to put up with the insult because the customer is entitled to because they paid, and may also bring future business. I think there's a line in the sand (which will vary person to person) where inappropriate unprovoked rude behaviour should not be tolerated by customers. That's all. My line is around unprovoked verbal abuse, where I'll give the customer a serve to protect the employee. Obviously if it's a common theme around a particular employee, perhaps they are the issue !!
- maccard 4y agoIn my experience no amount of talking down will deescalate a difficult customer who escalates to the point of abuse or disrespect. The only effective method for dealing with them (based on working in retail and PC repair for 5 years) is to gray rock them, be as unhelpful as possible and disengage the situation, and hope the next time you deal with them that they're more reasonable.
- mdp2021 4y ago> gray rock Which is - to my understanding of what it could mean - one the most disrespectful behaviours possible. And disrespect to that level could lead to violence, depending on the culture of the interlocutor. Even more than earlier, further recommendation to throw checks and good sense is suggested - cooling down the situation and remaining fixed in lucid reasoning (which includes, remaining respectful - which excludes, showing you are ignoring the interlocutor). Edit: I will rephrase, for even more clarity: if somebody were irritated, and the listener started playing uninterested and distracted - well that amounts not to the "small terms" of just putting fuel to a fire, but carpeting napalm.
- dang 4y agoRelated: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19483313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19483313 - March 2019 (191 comments) Golden Rules for Making Money (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320169 - March 2016 (180 comments) Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. Barnum (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310056 - Sept 2008 (56 comments) Art of Money Getting, by P. T. Barnum (actual book, 1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88544 - Dec 2007 (12 comments)
- SteveSmith16384 4y agoLooks like it was due another repost.
- chiffre01 4y agoHN comments on this seem to get more cynical over time.
- all2 4y agoI'd wager that people are getting more cynical over time. Cynicism sort of launched mid to late 90s in the US and its only gotten worse over the last 30 years.
- i_dont_know_ 4y agoThat PT Barnum... it's interesting because it really is a good read, and the whole way through you do feel like he's giving you some kind of good advice (so, if you had purchased it back in the day you don't feel ripped off), but at the same time it's not really practically actionable. You won't actually get closer to being like PT Barnum (even if you were reading it in the 1800s) or understand the steps to becoming like him, or necessarily become any better at making money. But at the same time, you're satisfied enough with the read to feel like you hadn't wasted your time and money on it. That's his real trick :)
- ahartmetz 4y agoIIRC from when this book was mentioned earlier, probably on HN, he toured the US giving lectures about getting rich while he was broke.
- camillomiller 4y agoIt would be probably be very successful as a fake-rich influencer
- theonemind 4y agofar be it from PT Barnum to be overly scrupulous, but he seemed to have a problem with getting financially wiped out by fire and built a fortune three of four times over, so it's possible he could've done it twice by the time he did the lectures and just been broke at the moment. He might've been one of the most qualified people around to make a lecture about getting rich.
- trabant00 4y agoThere is no recipe to making money so what generally applicable advice can be given is more often what _not_ to do. I find this applies to most areas, from losing weight to romantic relationships. And judging by my anecdotal evidence of people who failed to make money I can find pretty much all the traps listed in there. Many, including me, would have avoided a lot of pain if they would have kept these rules in mind at all times.
- 4y ago
- marban 4y agoCheck out Felix Dennis's books for a modern take.
- petecooper 4y agoFelix Dennis - "How To Get Rich" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1837402.How_to_Get_Rich https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1837402.How_to_Get_Rich
- rjrodger 4y agoSalty, but a true classic. Having read easily several hundred "business" books, this one is my desert island book.
- dmos62 4y ago> a South London lad who became rich virtually by accident I think I'll read this, considering others' praise, but I find it funny that the abstract introduces the "expert" at getting rich as someone who did it by accident: doesn't that imply that he didn't know how to do it?
- peepee1982 4y agoI read that book coming to the conclusion getting rich is not worth it and subject to luck and a lack of mental health. Which I think is pretty much what Felix Dennis intended. I bought the book expecting practical advice (I was young and had no love for myself), but was surprised by a rather poignant read. It's been a long time, though. I remember mostly the part about hookers and drugs ruining his health.
- WJW 4y agoI think it technically only implies that at the time when he first became rich, he didn't understand why. It's possible that he has since discovered what exactly happened. As a sibling comment already implied, the core message of the book is that the price of getting rich is often not worth it. I personally also enjoy the "Rich but not famous" essay by Tim Ferriss at https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/ https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/ which has a lot of vivid descriptions of the downsides of fame.
- nomorewords 4y agoThis feels like it would be most helpful to a teen who's just starting out. Otherwise, I just see this as a reminder to "be within my own boundaries" with regards to spending, work, etc.
- herpderperator 4y ago> Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. The old proverb is full of truth and meaning, "Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well." Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business.
- Dalewyn 4y agoPut more simply: Effort doesn't guarantee reward, but all rewards come as a consequence of effort.
- steveBK123 4y agoThe secret is the luck & skill of making sure your efforts go towards the options in front of you (or in the curation/creation of options) that have the best balance of size & odds of reward.
- bretbernhoft 4y agoI'm really excited to see another link to The Gutenberg Project. They do amazing work. And if their download stats are accurate, they must be one of the largest libraries of PDFs on the public Internet.
- mdp2021 4y ago> excited to see another link to [Project Gutenberg] ... they ... It is a bit different. They started it, they started it all. The Project started in 1971, when Michael S. Hart as a student was offered computer use and realized it was a good idea to digitize texts, for preservation and distribution. Project Gutenberg is one of the foremost Cultural Preservation and Promotion Projects of the XX Century.
- wrp 4y agoA while ago, I was helping a student collect 19th century texts for corpus analysis. Since the books were out of copyright, PDFs were downloadable from Google and the Internet Archive. Although the scanned versions from the two sources were equivalent, the OCRed versions were very different. The OCRed texts from Google had a very low error rate and could be easily corrected by hand. The ones from IA were unusable, with many extreme typos on every line.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- genericacct 4y agoI'm here to bemoan the fact that project gutenberg is censored on italian soil and italian DNS for no. good. reason.
- wanderingmind 4y agoUsing DNS over https in Firefox should typically avoid any domain name blocking
- rwmj 4y agoIs any reason given, even a not good one?
- genericacct 4y agoNo. The site will not resolve at all. If you dig around the web youll find out that it's because one of their books infringes on the rights of some publisher. The book and the publisher are unknown to me, but they succeded in getting the site blacklisted, all of it. The optics of the whole thing are horrendous imho
- jxf 4y agoThis reads like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
- pipeline_peak 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum#Early_life "He began his career as a showman in 1835 when he was 25 with the purchase and exhibition of a blind and almost completely paralyzed slave woman named Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as George Washington's former nurse and 161 years old. Slavery was already outlawed in New York, but he exploited a loophole which allowed him to lease her for a year for $1,000, borrowing $500 to complete the sale. Heth died in February 1836, at no more than 80 years old. Barnum had worked her for 10 to 12 hours a day, and he hosted a live autopsy of her body in a New York saloon where spectators paid 50 cents to see the dead woman cut up, as he revealed that she was likely half her purported age"
- w10-1 4y agoNarcissism is the key to success. To boldly go where no man has gone before, into forms of exploitation unthinkable to others.
- moneywoes 4y agoThe first self help book?
- thenerdhead 4y agoNo, there was a book called "Self help" by Samuel Smiles a few years prior. But self help has been around forever dating back to ancient Egypt.
- w10-1 4y agoAnother comment pointed out that at 25, Barnum exploited an old black woman as a slave in a sideshow, eventually after she died selling tickets to her dissection. At 45, Barnum destroyed a true engineer-entrepreneur. In an era where clocks were essential for organizing commerce as the country grew, Chauncey Jerome revolutionized clockmaking by using stamped-out brass gears - both cheaper and more reliable, among the first shifts from craft to manufacturing. Then Barnum suckered Jerome into a venture that destroyed all the wealth and business Jerome had accumulated. But we don't directly have that kind of impact... crypto, brick-and-mortar businesses, journalism if not democracy, the rise of successful surveillance states, the ubiquity of software rented instead of bought coupled with complete absence of warranty, digital services coupled to force arbitration clauses...
- kthejoker2 4y agoFirst, most of the comments are about getting rich, which is a different skill than making money. To make money, sell something valuable to others. To get rich, first you have to define "rich" - most people's definition is attainable purely by the thing above, over a long enough period of time. For large enough definitions of "rich", or if you want to get rich "quick", you have one of two ways: get a lot of money from a small number of people, or a little money from a large number of people. Each requires different talents, a tremendous amount of luck, and ultimately a willingness to lie, cheat, and steal to hold on to the ladder as you climb. It's certainly something we as a society should dissuade. The more people we have in mode A - sell something valuable, get modestly wealthy over a long period of time - the better off we are.